Adrian Goiginger’s “Märzengrund” brings the Heimatfilm back to the cinema rather unsuccessfully – and it is omnipresent anyway.
Anyone looking at German-language cinema from the outside will usually have the word “Heimat” at hand. The dilemma of this film culture can also be pinpointed to some extent by its ambivalent relationship to tradition, landscape and sentiment. The German Heimatfilm of the post-war period was the bogeyman of the young filmmakers who launched the New German Cinema in 1962 with the Oberhausen Manifesto. One of them was Edgar Reitz, who would later reevaluate the concept of home for film history with his film of the same name. At the upcoming Venice Film Festival, the 89-year-old can look forward to an honor and present a restored version of “Heimat 2” after 30 years.
And today? The Heimatfilm is once again a brand on television, unbroken in sentimental mountain farmer romances. The Bavarian dialect comedy “Gugelhupfgeschwader”, already the eighth part of the series, is currently leading the German cinema charts – almost unnoticed in the rest of the republic. The Heimatfilm cannot be killed and yet it is rarely alive.
Adrian Goiginger’s “Märzengrund”, an Austrian-German co-production, wants to be everything at once, author and audience film, alpine farmer drama and dropout portrait. First of all, however, it is a Heimat film, as it was once in the book: In the sixties, the landowner’s son Elias (Jakob Mader, then Johannes Krisch) is growing up in a Tyrolean village, but he rejects all wealth when his dominant mother ( Gerti Drassl) denied his true happiness. Unable to get his ultra-conservative parents to marry a divorced woman, he chooses forty years of solitude and moves into a mountain hut. “But there’s nothing up there,” a friend points out. “But I!”.
A flashback structure sets this time frame right at the beginning, which makes this film tether itself like a mountain goat. Everything has a frame in a story that actually wants to tell an escape utopia: the love story remains only a miniature, the hit village disco backdrop, the landscapes postcards. And when the main character has finally freed himself from her bonds, nature is surprisingly tame. Where there would be room for eventful nature photography like in “Into the Wild” or “Die Wand”, the missed love story reports back – belatedly – from memory. Now the aged hermit can finally think of the right words: “You have chamois eyes. Lips red like brunelles. Blessed are you.”
His demanding debut
You have to give the Heimatfilm of the fifties one thing: at least it took its kitsch seriously. In his best examples, he even achieved a fairytale-like poetry that was actually unique to this genre. Goiginger, who with his first feature film “The Best of All Worlds” managed the rare balancing act of celebrating one of the greatest public successes in Austria with a sophisticated festival film, fears any hardship this time. His film shies away from the radicalism that a dropout story demands, even in this form – and that American independent cinema often shakes up so lightly in nature dramas. In contemporary history – the hermit has to return to the hated civilization because of a tumor operation – the TV mountain doctor could then come in through the door at any time.
What would be said against looking for the cliché – genre cinema thrives on it. But a figure carved out of such crude wood as the witch-like mother naturally also calls for a certain expressionism in its surroundings. It’s difficult to place caricatures in a tame realism – here, too, the German entertainment cinema of the fifties was further: It simply left it with the woodcut quality, which can be in good hands in forest backdrops.
A case for the Coen brothers
But would such a cinema still be possible today? Could the truth of the false, which the “Forster from Silver Forest” so confidently claimed for himself, still be brought to the screen today? Maybe it would be a good challenge for Todd Haynes or the Coen brothers. It would be worth a try.
Märzengrund. D/A 2022. Director: Adrian Goiginger. 110 min.
